1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to image processing. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and apparatus for creating a high-fidelity glyph prototype from low-resolution glyph images.
2. Related Art
As businesses and other organizations become progressively more computerized, it is becoming increasingly common to store and maintain electronic versions of paper documents on computer systems. The process of storing a paper document on a computer system typically involves a “document-imaging” process, which converts a copy of the paper document into an electronic document. This document-imaging process typically begins with an imaging step, wherein document page-images are generated using a scanner, a copier, a camera, or any other imaging device. Unfortunately, this document-imaging process can often result in noise being introduced into the image, which can cause an imperfect conversion of the paper document into an electronic document.
One method for reproducing both the logical content and the physical appearance of the source document while reducing the overall file size involves creating “synthetic fonts” to represent characters in the original document. However, the scanned image glyphs are at a lower resolution and poorer quality than the original font glyphs in the source document. Consequently, the synthetic font often does not accurately represent the actual font in the source document. For example, while converting a grayscale synthetic font into a monochrome synthetic font, the resulting monochrome synthetic font is often too light or too dark in comparison to the original font.
Hence, what is needed is a method and an apparatus for producing synthetic fonts without the above-listed problems.